Geographic Protocols in Sensor Networks
Karim Seada, Ahmed Helmy · 2004
In wireless sensor networks, building efficient and scalable protocols is a very challenging task due to the limited resources and the high scale and dynamics. Geographic protocols, that take advantage of the location information of nodes, are very valuable for sensor networks. The state required to be maintained is minimum and their overhead is low, in addition to their fast response to dynamics. In this chapter, we present an extensive overview of geographic protocols providing basic functions such as geographic routing, geocasting, and geographic-based rendezvous mechanisms. We introduce also some of our work on assessing and improving the robustness of geographic protocols to non-ideal realistic conditionscorresponding to the real -world environments. Sensor networks are networks of small embedded low-power devices that can operate unattended to monitor and measure different phenomena in theenvironment. Sensor networks are suited for applications such as habitat monitoring, infrastructure protection, security, and tracking. Geographic protocols are very promising forsensor networks . These protocols take advantage of the location informationof nodes to provide higher efficiency and scalability. In wireless environments, the locations of nodes correspond to their network connectivity, which makes geographic protocols natural components in these environments and it is expected that they will become major elements for the development of these networks. For obtaining the location information, different kinds of localization systems exist such as GPS, infrastructure-based localization systems, and ad-hoc localization systems. In this chapter, e wiwll examine basic geographic protocols at the network layer: geographic routing, geocasting and geographic rendezvous mechanisms. Geographic routing provides a way to deliver a packet to a destination location, based only on local information and without the need for any extra infrastructure, which makes geographic routing the main basic component for